aGNeS News Forum BBS - What's New?

aGNeS News Forum BBS is always changing: new options, new features, most of them suggested by numerous aGNeS users. You will always find latest developments on this page.

Minor new features

newly available in the remotely hosted version
	added test mail exchanger function to first time admin section (build 4.21.1523.0)
	added persistent article links, you can reference any article per number without the archive name or with a wrong archive name (build 4.21.1523.0)
	corrected bug: creation of forums with a non-alpha first character, such as a number (build 4.21.0610.0)
	<!--AGNES-ARTICLE-COUNT-->, <!--AGNES-PAGES-->, <!--AGNES-PAGES-COUNT--> and <!--AGNES-PAGE--> are now available on all templates (build 4.21.0609.0)
	corrected bug: wrong page links at boundary article counts (build 4.21.0609.0)
	added <!--AGNES-PAGES-COUNT--> which shows the total number of available pages (build 4.21.0609.0)
	if a forum exceeds 300 articles, it is automatically archived; a new archive called Automatic Archive with the immediate date is created; this will take a considerable load off the Vestris server and reduce traffic and management work for webmasters of heavily used forums (06-Mar-2000)
	added <!--ARTICLE-FOLLOWUPS--> which shows full links to article followups in article.html (23-Dec-2004)
	added <!--ARTICLE-PARENT--> which shows a full link to the parent article in article.html and <!--AGNES-PARENT--> that uses <!--SET PARENT--text--> to generate an URL to the parent article (23-Dec-2004)
	added <!--SET COMPLETE--2--> to already available 0, 1 and -1 values, which shows article responses as full links with author name, email and post date (23-Dec-2004)
	fixed bug: heavy forums appending bogus data to the header.list file or uncompliant remote IP string patched by proxy servers containing CRs or LFs made forums unloadable in rare cases (22-Dec-2004)
	fixed bug: daylight saving shifted articles posted between midnight and 1AM back to the previous day and thus displayed an incorrect new icon (22-Dec-2004)
	added <!--SET OPEN-ARCHIVE--text--> and <!--SET CLOSE-ARCHIVE--text-->, which define the text to show before and after an archive link
	added <!--SET BETWEEN-ARCHIVE--text-->, which defines the text to show between two archive links
	added <!--SET REVERSE-ARCHIVE--1--> will output archives in the inverse chronologic order
	added <!--SET GROUPBREAK--text-->, which defines the text to show between groups of articles (article and it's decendants) in the articles list
	added <!--SET HIDE-IP--1-->, which disables the +ip option unless it is followed by the administrator's password, for example +iptoto when the password is "toto"
	added <!--SET EXTFACES-COLS--X--> in postnew.html and article.html where X is a non nil positive integer will show aGNeS faces in X columns (default is 2). For example <!--SET EXTFACES-COLS--3-->

Major new features

Notifying About Moderated Posts

It is now possible to show a special message defined by  when a new article is posted to a moderated forum. This message can of course be any valid HTML code, including images, text, etc. It will appear at the location of the  tag in header.html.

Private, Password Protected Forums

From the management section (?manage), once logged in a new set of user-related options is available. To protect the forum and to be able to create users that can access it, enter your password and thus enable the user mode. You'll be able to create and remove users, change their passwords, etc.

A login will appear when a user cannot be authentified. This uses cookies expiring after each netscape/explorer session.

There a link between name in login and name of article posts - a user cannot post an article with a different name than his own.

The user can change his password at login time.

Page Mode

Calling the forum with +Page1 and adding the following options to the forum will activate a page mode:

defines the amount of threads per page
shows links to next, previous and other pages using  and  as text options
shows the current page at the desired location

IP Banning

 - pay attention to place dots in front of incomplete names and at the end of incomplete IPs, otherwise "ge.ch" will ban "someip.ge.ch" and "unige.ch" as well.

Answers Posted via Email

   define text to be inserted into emailed followups (when "send followups by mail" option is checked). Default is in response to your article for the header, wrote: for the intermediate value and and no text set for the footer.

Posting Followups on Same Page

 disables the row containing the link to the parent article when replying to it;  has almost the same effect, but PARENT-POST allows to separate article replying with the article itself when articles are replied on the same page where they are shown (article.html), possible by placing tags from follow.html in article.html

Reply Prefix

 (placed on all pages receiving or generating a post form, normally header.html, postnew.html, follow.html and preview.html) allows to change the article prefix when replying to an article; default is Re:, an empty value will generate no prefix.

Email, Name and Date Hiding

    placed on all pages will hide article author's email (anti-spam measure), name or/and article date

Cookies / Name and Email

aGNeS sets two cookies for Name and Email that expire each time your browser is closed. When posting new articles and article followups, name and email is automatically set using those cookies.

Server Certificates / aGNeS Distribution

aGNeS is now totally free for non-commercial organizations. You may download a binary for your server at this page. Also, if you're a commercial organization, you may buy aGNeS after giving it a try on your own machine!

Dynamic Variables

Dynamic variables allow to have custom content of aGNeS News Forums depending on various parameters. For example, it is possible to show the IP of the remote machine loading the aGNeS News Forum or to use same templates for different forums and change the forum title depending on the data alias used.

Example: I have two forums, one at .../cgi-bin/agnes?CommentsAgnes+CommentsAgnesHTML used for comments on Vestris software, and .../cgi-bin/agnes?SuggestionsAgnes+SuggestionsAgnesHTML used for suggestions. CommentsAgnesHTML and SuggestionsAgnesHTML point to the same template pages. The idea is to show "Comments" on the first forum and "Suggestions" on the second one. This is done by placing the following code on the header.html page (which is the same for both forums):

<!--DYNAMIC--
£alias|[ISCommentsAgnes]~[Comments]^[Suggestions]
-->

Check the aGNeS documentation for full details.

Collapsing Levels of Articles

  and the command line +collapseX option allow to collapse the article tree to level X, show a link to the next level defined by  and to a non collapsed forum defined by .

You can now add a single thread expand to your articles list. Call your forum with the +expand0 option: a + sign will appear. Clicking on it will expand the current thread. You can change the default value of the + sign using the  option. A - sign is shown when a thread has no children and a > sign is shown when the current thread is selected. Those values can be changed with  and  .

Please check the Infomaniak Tech Forum that implements this feature for an example. Also see the source of the header.html template page.

RegExp Search

 - available for header.html and search.html. This is a complete implementation of a simple RegExp, also used in XReplace-32, original code (although severely modified) is © Henry Spencer, University of Toronto.

character	description
^	Beginning of the string. The expression "^A" will match an ‘A’ only at the beginning of the string.
^	The caret (^) immediately following the left-bracket ([) has a different meaning. It is used to exclude the remaining characters within brackets from matching the target string. The expression "[^0-9]" indicates that the target character should not be a digit.
$	The dollar sign ($) will match the end of the string. The expression "abc$" will match the sub-string "abc" only if it is at the end of the string.
\|	The alternation character (\|) allows either expression on its side to match the target string. The expression "a\|b" will match ‘a’ as well as ‘b’.
.	The dot (.) will match any character.
*	The asterix (*) indicates that the character to the left of the asterix in the expression should match 0 or more times.
+	The plus (+) is similar to asterix but there should be at least one match of the character to the left of the + sign in the expression.
?	The question mark (?) matches the character to its left 0 or 1 times.
(	The parenthesis affects the order of pattern evaluation and also serves as a tagged expression that can be used when replacing the matched sub-string with another expression.
[]	Brackets ([ and ]) enclosing a set of characters indicates that any of the enclosed characters may match the target character.

Random Content

This is still under construction and might not be kept in some future release. <$--RANDOM...-$-...-$-... ...--> is a higher level tag than  allowing random content (one of the ...) anywhere in any MV4 CGI script. (for a demo, check out http://www.cinemas.ch, and the first template page http://www.cinemas.ch/start.html that uses this tag). This top level tag can contain and cross other tags of the  style.

Moderated Forums

Added a set of options to moderate the forum. Basically, a  option does the job. Moderated article have to be released by editing them with +edit appended at the command line, selecting an article and unchecking the moderation field checkbox. A password is of course required to release a moderated article. A set of other options is available to play with the look and feel of the moderated forums.

Group Management

Group management has been introduced with the new MV5 Scripting Host. For now, new forums can be created and the group cache updater can be accessed throught .../agnes?manage. For example, if your aGNeS BBS url is http://www.vestris.com/db-cgi/intensive/ agnes?StiAgnesBBS+StiAgnesBBSHTML, the manage console is at http://www.vestris.com/db-cgi/intensive/ agnes?manage .

Using the MV4 Scripting Host, you can change your BBS password, delete your BBS, update the MV4 CGI Cache, change the administrator's name and e-mail and modify the location of the template pages.

IP tracking

Adding +ip to the command line will show IPs used to post each article. Together with date and time, this might allow the administrator to track troublemakers.

Field Forcing

   placed on both header.html and preview.html will force the authors to input a valid subject, author name and/or email. Besides, e-mail is now verified for compliance to RFC822.